Our Great Adventure : The Spice Island

St.Georges, Grenada

If Guadaloupe is the kitchen of the Caribbean and Dominica is its backyard, Grenada is its oversized thumping stereo system. The calypso and soca beats could be heard well offshore as we pulled into the beautiful anchorage near the capital of St Georges.

Grenada is famous in the cruising community for a different reason - it is outside of the “hurricane zone”. Geeky tidbit about hurricanes: they start to form near the equator but they need to be far enough from the equator to start and continue to spin. There is no good definition of “far enough” but the boat insurance industry seems to think that anything below 12.5 degrees latitude, including Grenada, is good enough. (But just google “hurricane ivan” to see what happens when it isn’t…) This brings hundreds of boats to the island from June to October.

We joined the masses in July and started looking for a good place to leave the boat while we flew home for a bit to see friends and family. We settled on the Grenada Yacht Club, a little place in the heart of St Georges that accepted a few foreign boats and luckily they had a space for us. To make this amazing country even better, we were in the heart of mango season, and we returned from the “Mango Festival” with a gigantic bag of delicious mangoes for $3.00! Even luckier, they were just down the road from some of the best roti we had ever tasted! We spent several days cleaning the boat and securing it to make it bug, mould, and storm proof. In case you're wondering "how dirty can the boat be?" These are a pair of shoes I found in the closet - the mold struggle is intense!

Ewwwwww

It was amazing to have my mum as another pair of hands as it made the hard work go so much faster. It allowed us to take a few short breaks with trips to the Chocolate Museum and walks to the waterfall in Grand Etang park up in the mountains. To reward ourselves for days of hot, sweaty, hard work we spent the last night in Grenada before flying home in a lovely small hotel. We relaxed by the pool and wandered down to the beach for one last warm ocean swim before heading back to Canada in the morning.

They don't call it "The Spice Island" for nothing!

We left Grenada having fallen in love with the Spice Island and thankful we would soon return…

James came back before me in early September to get the boat ready for Season 2. He returned in the height of the rainy season which can be defined as extremely hot and humid with a rain shower just as you drift off to sleep with all the hatches open. Also within days of returning to Grenada he started watching a low pressure system in the mid-Atlantic which had similar characteristics to the devastating Hurricane Ivan (it was moving low and slow). We both breathed a sigh of relief as the models started to show the disturbance curving up towards Martinique and St Lucia. This meant that Grenada would be on the less dangerous side of the storm and the boat would hopefully be safe. Nevertheless the island shut down and turned of its water and power grid just to be safe. On the day the storm arrived, a westerly wind brought heavy swells into the yacht club and made it difficult to get on and off the boat. Thankfully this was the extent of it - Nomads had weathered its first tropical storm! That day it was upgraded to Tropical Storm Matthew - it soon became a hurricane and went on to kill 1600 people and cause 15 billion dollars in damage. In fact, Matthew followed a very similar course to what we had sailed in Season 1, meaning that many of the places we had visited, including Haiti and Bahamas, would be devastated. When I flew back to Grenada from Miami we had to reroute the plane and flew well off course adding another two hours to our trip as our original flight plan was right where Matthew was! It was a very turbulent and bumpy ride and I was glad when we landed.

When I returned to Grenada the boat was in better shape than ever. We managed to solve some issues that had been plaguing us for quite some time, except for the autopilot, but that’s another story! We anchored on the south side of the island in Prickly Bay to await the arrival of our new pump and the end of storm season. The south side of Grenada is essentially a retirement community for boaters, with bingo nights, volleyball, movie nights, etc. It’s a scene we don’t usually go for, but with the proximity to marine stores and free showers, Prickly Bay would do just fine for a few weeks. There was even a flag maker and mum treated us to a much needed handmade Canada flag to proudly sly from our boat :)

"Before"

"After"

In between the remaining boat jobs we made several trips back to St Georges, hiked to the Seven Sisters waterfall in Grand Etang park, and walked to some of the beautiful beaches in the area. For an island most people back home had never heard of, Grenada blew almost all of the other usual holiday destinations out of the water!